Amy Shackleton Paints the City with a Lightning Quick Brush

Toronto-based artist Amy Shackleton has a lot to celebrate. At only 25 the extraordinary painter has had her work featured in galleries in New York, London, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. She has been honored with numerous prestigious awards and after seeing her in action, it's not hard to see why.

Working with acrylic and enamel, Shackleton creates vibrant, streaky renderings of urban scenes. Ordinarily, paintings that feature the sights and sounds of cityscapes usually capture the dinginess rather than the unnaturally bright colors and the irresistible hum of unrelenting excitement. Shackleton appears in this time-lapse video to slap the paint to the canvas rather than carefully applying it. She allows gravity to do the rest of the work, allowing chance and a controlled form of chaos to seep into her pieces. Her process accurately captures the ebb and flow of city life, traveling at such a pace that our eyes cannot to adjust quickly enough to really focus on detail of the scene.